Skyagunsta Pickens is the pen name of Teresa Simon-Noble, 67, of Florida. Native Americans gave the name Skyagunsta, meaning “wise warrior” to her great-great-grandfather Andrew Pickens. It means wise warrior. She was born in Cuba, the daughter of a Cuban father and an American mother whose family line has been in the United States since the Revolutionary War.

She has published several articles under her real name in Online Journal. She has also published in OpEdNews as TSN and as Elena Dumas. Many of these articles are critical of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. She has also published poetry under her real name in Poets Against the War.

Skyagunsta is a retired Family Therapist, a poet and someone who likes to think of herself as a Liberal. She believes in taxes for all for the good of all. Philosophy, literature and the understanding of the human being are three of Skyagunsta’s most beloved topics.

Yeah, I know…I’ve been away. Besides another bout of burnout from seeing so many important issues and not being able to deal with them all, I have had a few major changes in my personal life.

I am doing well health wise — not so great financially — but I am still stuck for the optimum blog set up. WordPress allows me to upload sound without putting limits on the size of each item. This is good because I have numerous radio pieces I would like to have all in one place. However, the audio has to be appended to a post rather than stacked in an .mp3 player. Ning let’s me stack my pieces in a player but limits each piece to 20 MB, which is a pain because I have to compress the hell out of my longer pieces and still I would have to break them up into parts, which is time consuming for me and also extra work for my listeners.

Do any of you have an idea as to where 1) I can stack audio in a single player so that my archives are easy to find 2) there is no limit size on individual pieces as opposed to a general limit on total MB’s of audio that can be uploaded to the site, 3) I can arrange them in whatever order I wawnt and ever change order and 4) is free?

Meanwhile, I will try to be better about updating this blog more frequently. I will generally use the following format: A news item followed by my reaction to it as I was doing toward the end. My longer format writing will go elsewhere.

April 3, 2009
The WordPress Twitter widget is new and still has bugs. If you see the message “no response from Twitter” in the Twitter widget on the left sidebar, please refresh the page. Maybe that will work. Maybe not.

If you would like to comment on anything I have posted in the Twitter widget on the left sidebar, please feel free to do so here.

That site will focus on my work and I hope will host discussions. I think it is more suited to multimedia presentation, at least as I want to do it, than this platform is. You are invited to join it.

This site will post interesting articles written by others. Activity on it should increase as it will be easy for me to just post articles to it. You are welcome to also be here to read and comment on what you have read.

“Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has decided to appoint a prosecutor to examine nearly a dozen cases in which CIA interrogators and contractors may have violated anti-torture laws and other statutes when they threatened terrorism suspects, according to two sources familiar with the move,” Carrie Johnson reports in The Washington Post.

The appointment comes on the same day the Obama administration released a less-redacted version of an inspector general report detailing CIA abuses.

“The report says one interrogator threatened to kill the children of a Sept. 11 suspect, and another may have threatened to [sexually] assault a suspect’s mother in front of him,” the Associated Press reported.

The revelations are an echo of an August, 2002 memo that showed the Bush administration’s initial approval of using insects as a means of torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s children. A second leaked memo later claimed the technique was never applied. However, at a military tribunal in 2007, the father of a Guantanamo detainee alleged that Pakistani guards had confessed that American interrogators used ants to coerce Mohammed’s children into revealing their father’s whereabouts.

According to the Post, “John Durham, a career Justice Department prosecutor from Connecticut,” is being tapped “to lead the high-stakes inquiry, added the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the process is not yet complete.”

The New York Times added: “President Obama does not intend to voice his preference for whether anyone is prosecuted from prisoner abuse cases, a White House spokesman said Monday, and will allow Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to make the decision.”

Deputy White House press secretary Bill Burton told reporters Monday that the president had complete faith in Holder and that the decision whether to launch an investigation was the attorney general’s sole prerogative.

“The White House supports the attorney general making the decisions on who gets prosecuted and investigated,” Deputy White House press secretary Bill Burton said, according to the Post.

Durham is no stranger to hard-slog prosecutions. A 30-plus-year veteran, he was most recently appointed by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate the CIA’s destruction of terror war interrogation tapes.

When Mukasey selected Durham, Talking Points Memo posted a brief outline of his work history, quoting the Associated Press as saying that he’s “one of the nation’s most relentless prosecutors.”

Durham’s investigation of the missing or destroyed CIA interrogation tapes is ongoing, and several high-ranking officials have testified before a federal grand jury in Virginia. That investigation is ongoing.

“Mr. Durham has shrouded his investigation in a level of secrecy rare even by the normally tight-lipped standards of special prosecutors, and after 18 months it is still difficult to assess either the direction or the targets of his investigation,” The New York Times reported in July.

The Post’s report is the first confirmation that the Justice Department will open a formal investigation into the CIA’s alleged torture of terror war prisoners.

“Responsibility for the torture program cannot be laid at the feet of a few low-level operatives,” read a Center for Constitutional Rights statement on the matter. “Some agents in the field may have gone further than the limits so ghoulishly laid out by the lawyers who twisted the law to create legal cover for the program, but it is the lawyers and the officials who oversaw and approved the program who must be investigated.”

The watchdog group added: “We call on the Obama administration not to tie a prosecutor’s hands but to let the investigation go as far up the chain of command as the facts lead. We must send a clear message to the rest of the world, to future officials, and to the victims of torture that justice will be served and that the rule of law has been restored.”

PARIS — Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School will be the site of a National Guard riot control drill Thursday morning to prepare in the event of a panic over distribution of serum to treat the swine flu.

The school on Route 26 at the Paris-Norway town line has been designated by state officials as a distribution site for the H1N1 flu vaccine. The drill is to prepare for a worst-case scenario should the serum have to be transported from Augusta and people rush to get it.

On Thursday morning, four or five National Guard Humvees will travel from Augusta to Paris with vials of fake serum. The National Guardsmen will take on the roles of panicked citizens and military police and practice what they would do, such as using tear gas, in the case of a riot.

“This is just a component of moving the stuff from point A to B,” said Oxford County Emergency Management Agency Director Scott Parker. The plan will be put into place only if needed, he said.

Plans were developed in April to have vials of serum sent from the federal government to Augusta, Parker said. From Augusta, the supplies will be transported to designated distribution centers.

During the April conference, concerns were raised about a possible out-of-control rush on the serum, Parker said. Because of that concern, Gov. John Baldacci and Gen. John Libby, adjutant general of the Maine National Guard, agreed that a plan should be devised to quell such a disturbance.

Local police chiefs have also been involved in the planning, Parker said. In a real event, local police would be in charge of security once the serum arrives in Paris. “We own it. We’re in charge of providing security,” he said.

As of Aug. 5, the Maine Center for Disease Control said there had been 323 confirmed cases of H1N1 in Maine, of which 176 are Maine residents and the rest out-of-staters diagnosed in Maine. A total of 19 people required hospitalization. Sixty percent of the victims were under the age of 25.

On Tuesday, health authorities reported Maine’s first death from the H1N1 virus. Dr. Dora Anne Mills, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control, said a York County man in his 50s was hospitalized for three weeks and died last week of underlying conditions complicated by H1N1.

The drill will take place behind the school and will not affect the day-to-day activities within the school. Access to the school building will be available through the main entrance, Parker said.

ldixon@sunjournal.com

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Note that serum to treat the flu is different from a vaccine to prevent the flu. Note also that Maine’s first death related to H1N1 was a York County man in his 50s was hospitalized for three weeks and died last week of underlying conditions complicated by H1N1. This has been typical of deaths related to swine flu and flu in general. So why is the government (and its stenographers in the media) getting all hot under the collar about swine flu? Why is the National Guard getting ready for a riot? Could it be the billions of dollars Big Pharma stand to make worldwide from mandatory vaccination programs?

Could it be, as one commenter to this article said:
ritamd says

We’re all going to be stampeding for WHAT?
The title should read’
“NATIONAL GUARD DRILL AT HIGH SCHOOL TO PREPARE FOR POSSIBLE H1N1 MANDATORY VACCINATION REFUSAL”

In building a case the prosecutor has to build his case brick by brick … each piece of evidence is just another building block … but when you look at the bricks at the right angle, the DA will show nothing because he has no case.

“My Cousin Vinny–Vincent LaGuardia Gambini”

Two things startled me during Frank Ricci’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, July 16, 2009.

Frank Ricci’s name and his case before a panel of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals is one of the bricks being thrown at Judge Sonya Sotomayor by many Republicans in Congress to derail her nomination to the United States Supreme Court.

Ricci has been at odds with Sotomayor ever since her opinion in Ricci vs. DeStefano, which upheld the ruling of the United States District Court, District of Connecticut, that Ricci and the other plaintiffs were not discriminated against by the City of New Haven when the City threw out the results of their promotions test. The District Court stated that the City had done nothing improper because it had not thrown out the tests results “based on race.” All applicants took the same test; all results were thrown out and nobody was promoted. The Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling by the District Court and refused to hear the case over the written dissents issued by Chief Judge Jacobs and Judge Cabranes.

Cabranes hit hard against the ruling by the 2nd Circuit Court panel that had adopted the district court’s ruling because, in writing their opinion, Cabranes said, the judges made no mention of the constitutional claims of reverse discrimination made by the firefighters against the City of New Haven.

It seems that the City of New Haven decided to throw out the results of the written test for promotion to lieutenant, which Ricci and other plaintiffs had aced, because the City felt the test did not truly measure performance ability.

The argument in support of the City’s position, as summed up by Emily Bazelton in the article, The Sotomayor Mystery , goes like this:

Why promote firefighters based on a written test rather than their performance in the field? Why favor multiple-choice questions over evaluations of leadership and execution? It’s like granting a driver’s license based solely on the written test, only with much higher stakes.

On listening to Ricci’s taped testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, I was struck by his difficulty in reading his statement. He stumbled over his words, and needed to follow his lines with his finger like many kids and even adults who are learning to read often do: left to right, left to right, left to right; one line after the other, the finger becoming like a cursor guiding his reading, keeping him focused and situated.

What I came to understand later, is that Ricci is dyslexic. Dyslexia is defined by the Merriam-Webster Medical Dictionary as ” a disturbance of the ability to read; broadly: disturbance of the ability to use language.” This new-found knowledge about Ricci confirmed the trouble I thought I heard as I listened to his testimony.

Further, the American Heritage Stedman’s Medical Dictionary also describes dyslexia as, “a learning disorder marked by impairment of the ability to recognize and comprehend words.” This fact explains why Ricci stated that he had to study harder than ever to pass his test for promotion in the New Haven Firefighters Department.

How would dyslexia affect Ricci’s performance as a fire lieutenant?

(I am also puzzled that while the initial video I linked to on c-span showed Ricci tracing his words with his finger and stumbling over some of his words, the video on the c-span archive now, freezes the image of the Ricci’s testimony on Wade Henderson, President and CEO of of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, at about 35:11 into the tape just as Henderson is finishing his testimony and Ricci is about to begin his.

This new video tape maintains the Wade Henderson image throughout Ricci’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and also gives a flawless audio presentation of Ricci statement to the Committee.

How did that happen when it was not so on the original tape?)

Rejection of anyone for any reason, be it race, gender, religion, weight, sexual preference, whatever the reason for the rejection is, is undoubtedly painful, as anyone who suffers a disability and is on the receiving end of it knows full well.

However, how people react to the pain of disability, rejection and/or discrimination really depends on the person’s ability to deal with that pain.

Some deal with it by looking within the self, accepting the limitation and working with it in whatever way they can towards minimizing the limitation.

In studying harder than he ever had, Ricci did some of that.

Others choose to cast blame and have an outer directed focus. Fault lies with the other person and not with the self. In deciding to sue, Ricci seems to have some of that as well.

In 1995 he made use of his dyslexia to claim “discrimination” against him by the City of New Haven for failing to hire him as a firefighter with their Department.

I think that was Ricci’s way of dealing with his pain and circumstance… and that seems to be Ricci’s way of dealing with his pain whenever he thinks his dyslexia has gotten in his way, as he did again in 1997 against the Middletown South Fire District for dismissing him from their Department. (See here.) And as he did again in 2004 when his promotion to lieutenant was denied in the case which has now made all the headlines.

Be all that as it may, on July 16th, Ricci presented himself to the Judiciary Committee, and to the rest of the country in what might have been a cry for sympathy for his disability, as a model of virtue and as a straight shooter who, “studied harder than ever [he] had before”, to prepare himself for the promotions to lieutenant test administered by the City of New Haven, through “listening to prepared tapes, making use of flash cards, reading again, highlighting, and going before numerous panels to prepare for the oral part of the exam,” all at the expense of having to neglect his role as husband and father.

He portrayed himself as a man making a worthwhile sacrifice on the way to climbing one more rung on the ladder to the American Dream, but when something went awry in his upward climb, Ricci once again went the “file a lawsuit” way.

The Constitution gives Ricci that right, but what was really motivating Ricci to go the lawsuit way? Was it a hurt ego, or hurt self-image? Or was he truly being discriminated against?

He claims that he and others were denied the promotion to lieutenant that acing their tests had earned them, because the City of New Haven, in 2004, felt that not enough minorities would be promoted and that the city would have to pay too high a political price for complying with Title VII, Civil Service Laws and the New Haven Charter, so it chose to promote no one.

He also claims that the Court of Appeals panel that ruled against the Firefighters in Ricci, did so, “in an unsigned, unpublished, summary order that mentioned my dyslexia, leading many to believe that” the case was about “me” and about “my disability and not about the important civil rights and constitutional claims we raised.”

So is Ricci here using his dyslexia and personal pain to excuse, or explain, why Ricci vs. DeStefano was taken all the way up to the Supreme Court where the decision of the panel of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals was reversed?

Frank Ricci has made much of the need for court cases to be decided based on the Constitution and the rule of law. He states, “Americans have the right to have cases judged based on the Constitution and on our laws — not on politics or personal feelings …” implying, as have those Republicans Senators and right-wing pundits, that the case before the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals was decided against him based on Sotomayor’s politics and/or personal feelings, rather than the rule of law and the application of judicial precedent to his case, as Sotomayor has repeated over and over and over again.

Despite Ricci’s use of words like, “the need to adhere to the rule of law,” he turns a totally blind eye to the fact that when the Appeals Panel of the 2nd Circuit issued their ruling in Ricci, they did so guided by the use of facts, LEGAL PRECEDENT and the rule of law as their compass with which to reach and issue their opinion.

Like the many Republicans on the committee, including fellow witness Linda Chavez, Ricci paints Sotomayor as a woman who rules by her feelings, a Latino judge who skipped over precedent and issued her opinion in Ricci based on a bias (reverse discrimination) against him.

Should Ricci be entitled to his promotion no matter what?

Should Sotomayor have written her opinion differently? Should she have provided for a different outcome even if, in doing so, she would have gone against set precedent? Should she have gone against the rule of law so touted by Ricci as the rule of law was when she issued her opinion?

At one point in his testimony, Ricci states, “this case had nothing to do with that,” meaning his disability.

He emphasized that the case “had everything to do with making sure our command officers were competent to handle the call and our right to advance based on merit regardless of race.”

Then he continues, “the lower courts’ belief that citizens should be reduced to racial statistics is flawed …” But, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute!

Didn’t Ricci just say that the court’s ruling was based on his dyslexia, thus making the case one about his disability and not about reverse discrimination as he n ow claims? Does that not imply that at no time Sotomayor’s opinion was one based on race?

Doesn’t the fact that important civil rights and constitutional claims are missing from the opinion the appellate panel, as Cabranes stated, make it clear that the opinion issued by Sotomayor was not based on racial bias, personal feelings, or personal politics?

Why is Ricci switching now and making it seem as if the ruling issued on his case was based on racial statistics rather than disability as he initially claimed?

Has Ricci’s dyslexia switched tracks on him unawares?

In the beginning of his testimony Ricci states that, “this is not a job that can be handed out without achievement, merit and qualifications …”

With the Senate and the public having seen Ricci struggle with his oral presentation, should be: would dyslexia contribute in any way to Ricci’s making an erroneous call in the midst of a fire emergency? The Slate article above describes Ricci as, “a 34 year old trukkie [who] throws ladders, breaks windows, and cuts holes for New Haven’s Truck 4.”

In the step-up position of commander in the field, having to assume responsibility for directing traffic, and other measures to ensure public safety, would Ricci’s dyslexia, in any way endanger the public or his fellow firefighters?

Was that the question that the panel had to give answer to, rather than a question of race?

It seems to me that if the rule of law does not conform to Ricci’s goal, then he is the one who makes use of feelings and the political spectrum within a court of law to justify his cry of injustice towards himself.

The second point that also startled me during Ricci’s testomy to the Senate Judiciary Committee was his answer to Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

“Specter: Do you have any reason to think that Judge Sotomayor acted in anything other than good faith in trying to reach a fair decision in your case?

“Ricci: That is beyond my expertise. I am not an attorney or legal scholar. I can’t answer that.”

Come on Ricci. Sen. Specter is not asking you to judge the legality of Sotomayor’s ruling. The Senator is asking whether you believe Sotomayor acted in anything other than good faith in reaching her decision in your case.

Should Sotomayor have ruled differently in the Ricci case?
Should she have overlooked set precedent and given an opinion benefiting Ricci?

Did she have the power to set new precedent like the Supreme Court did in negating the 2nd District Court of Appeal’s Decision?

It seems to me Ricci knows that the answer would be that Sotomayor acted with the best of good faith and judicial propriety in reaching her decision in his case. However, in admitting to Sotomayor’s good faith, Ricci would have to admit to some degree of his own weaselness.

Perhaps that is something that as the new standard-bearer for the white man, for the cause of his own advancement in the City of New Haven Firefighting Department, and as America’s new hero, Ricci may not want to do.

When the question of character arises, one has to ask does Ricci possess the character associated with a straight shooter and a qualified leader?

The answer might surprise many.

Perhaps there is a certain vindictive trait to Ricci’s character. Perhaps he feels that, if you hurt me, I am going to hurt you back, as in, if you don’t hire me, I’ll sue you. If you fire me, I’ll sue you, and if you injure me with a legal opinion, I am going to throw a brick at your opinion and your career.

Oerhaps that is what a few of the Senators on the Republican side realized. Perhaps that is why a few of the staunchest Republican Senators have already announced that they will be voting in favor of Sotomayor’s confirmation. Perhaps that is something that the Democratic Senators on that committee already knew based on the integrity of Sotomayor’s record.

Renault has refused to meet the demands of workers at French firm New Fabris in a similar dispute [AFP]

Staff who threatened to blow up machinery in a construction equipment plant in southwest France in a row over redundancy payments have had their severance money increased.

The 53 staff at JLG Industries in Tonneins will receive $42,000 for being made redundant after placing gas canisters in front of the plant and threatening to detonate them.

The workers at the factory, a subsidiary of US firm Oshkosh, were the third group of French workers this week to threaten to set off explosions in order to get their complaints heard.

Christian Amadio, the head of the works council at JLG said: “It’s shame we had to go so far to obtain a result”.

‘Blackmail’

Amadio said that after four hours of talks overnight with JLG management and a local government mediator, the company had offered to pay $42,000 per laid-off worker on condition that the workers return to work on Monday.

Pierre Martin, the mediator, said the workers will have two options, a plan allowing them to receive job training in other fields and receive $35,000 in severance, or opt out of the plan and receive $42,000.

The 53 workers will be officially laid off on September 28.

Laurent Wauquiez, the French employment minister, described the blast threats as “blackmail”.

But the government has stopped short of sending in police, saying it understands the distress of workers hit by the recession and suggesting it sees the radical tactics as a media stunt rather than a serious threat.

Offer rejected

The explosion threats are the latest tactic by disgruntled staff following a wave of “bossnappings” in which French workers took their managers hostage over factory closures.

On Thursday, Renault, the French car manufacturer, refused to meet the demands of workers at New Fabris, a bankrupt car-parts supplier, who threatened at the weekend to blow up gas canisters inside their factory in Chatellerault in western France.

Workers at the company want Renault and PSA-Peugeot Citreon, another French car producer, who account for 90 per cent of their business, to pay $42,000 to each of the 366 laid-off employees.

Both the car companies have said it is not their responsibility to pay compensation to the workers.

Renault offered on Thursday to buy up the stock of parts that were intended for it, and for the proceeds to be paid to New Fabris workers, but unions rejected the offer, which they estimated at $4,200 per head.

Laid-off workers at Nortel Networks, a telecoms firm near Paris, made a copycat threat on Monday, briefly threatening to blow up their factory before backing down the following day and obtaining a resumption of talks with their management.

______
Right on, French workers!!! Yes, it is a terrible thing to have to resort to threats of violence, but as long as there is a link between getting the resources you need to live and having a job, getting terminated, fired, laid-off, furloughed, made redundant, whatever you want to call it, is an act of violence against which workers have the right of self-defense.

The best way to keep the peace is to stop taking “working for a living” as part of the natural human condition. I’m not arguing against work itself, but arguing against the idea that a person must be profitable to someone else in order to get resources for himself.

I live across the street from a bird sanctuary that harbors a lot of Canada geese. I don’t see them working for a boss in order to eat, and when they fly in formation, I see them taking turns at being the leader. They have brains the size of walnuts, yet they have figured out how to survive without exploiting each other. When will big-brained humans take the hint? –K.R.

There is no economy left to recover. The US manufacturing economy was lost to offshoring and free trade ideology. It was replaced by a mythical “New Economy.”

The “New Economy” was based on services. Its artificial life was fed by the Federal Reserve’s artificially low interest rates, which produced a real estate bubble, and by “free market” financial deregulation, which unleashed financial gangsters to new heights of debt leverage and fraudulent financial products.

The real economy was traded away for a make-believe economy. When the make-believe economy collapsed, Americans’ wealth in their real estate, pensions, and savings collapsed dramatically while their jobs disappeared.

The debt economy caused Americans to leverage their assets. They refinanced their homes and spent the equity. They maxed out numerous credit cards. They worked as many jobs as they could find. Debt expansion and multiple family incomes kept the economy going.

And now suddenly Americans can’t borrow in order to spend. They are over their heads in debt. Jobs are disappearing. America’s consumer economy, approximately 70 percent of GDP, is dead. Those Americans who still have jobs are saving against the prospect of job loss. Millions are homeless. Some have moved in with family and friends; others are living in tent cities.

Meanwhile the US government’s budget deficit has jumped from $455 billion in 2008 to $2,000 billion this year, with another $2,000 billion on the books for 2010. And President Obama has intensified America’s expensive war of aggression in Afghanistan and initiated a new war in Pakistan.

There is no way for these deficits to be financed except by printing money or by further collapse in stock markets that would drive people out of equity into bonds.

The US government’s budget is 50 percent in the red. That means half of every dollar the federal government spends must be borrowed or printed. Because of the worldwide debacle caused by Wall Street’s financial gangsterism, the world needs its own money and hasn’t $2 trillion annually to lend to Washington.

As dollars are printed, the growing supply adds to the pressure on the dollar’s role as reserve currency. Already America’s largest creditor, China, is admonishing Washington to protect China’s investment in US debt and is lobbying for a new reserve currency to replace the dollar before it collapses. According to various reports, China is spending down its holdings of US dollars by acquiring gold and stocks of raw materials and energy.

The price of one-ounce gold coins is $1,000 despite efforts of the US government to hold down the gold price. How high will this price jump when the rest of the world decides that the bankruptcy of “the world’s only superpower” is at hand?

And what will happen to America’s ability to import not only oil, but also the manufactured goods on which it is import-dependent?

When the oversupplied US dollar loses the reserve currency role, the US will no longer be able to pay for its massive imports of real goods and services with pieces of paper. Overnight, shortages will appear and Americans will be poorer.

Nothing in Presidents Bush and Obama’s economic policy addresses the real issues. Instead, Goldman Sachs was bailed out, more than once. As Eliot Spitzer said, the banks made a “bloody fortune” with US aid.

It was not the millions of now homeless homeowners who were bailed out. It was not the scant remains of American manufacturing — General Motors and Chrysler — that were bailed out. It was the Wall Street banks.

According to Bloomberg.com, Goldman Sachs’ current record earnings from their free or low cost capital supplied by broke American taxpayers has led the firm to decide to boost compensation and benefits by 33 percent. On an annual basis, this comes to compensation of $773,000 per employee.

This should tell even the most dimwitted patriot who “their” government represents.

The worst of the economic crisis has not yet hit. I don’t mean the rest of the real estate crisis that is waiting in the wings. Home prices will fall further when the foreclosed properties currently held off the market are dumped. Store and office closings are adversely impacting the ability of owners of shopping malls and office buildings to make their mortgage payments. Commercial real estate loans were also securitized and turned into derivatives.

The real crisis awaits us. It is the crisis of high unemployment, of stagnant and declining real wages confronted with rising prices from the printing of money to pay the government’s bills and from the dollar’s loss of exchange value. Suddenly, Wal-Mart prices will look like Nieman Marcus prices.

Retirees dependent on state pension systems, which cannot print money, might not be paid, or might be paid with IOUs. They will not even have depreciating money with which to try to pay their bills. Desperate tax authorities will squeeze the remaining life out of the middle class.

Nothing in Obama’s economic policy is directed at saving the US dollar as reserve currency or the livelihoods of the American people. Obama’s policy, like Bush’s before him, is keyed to the enrichment of Goldman Sachs and the armament industries.

Matt Taibbi describes Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentless jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Look at the Goldman Sachs representatives in the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. This bankster firm controls the economic policy of the United States.

Little wonder that Goldman Sachs has record earnings while the rest of us grow poorer by the day.

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.
—–
And when high energy costs make it too expensive to get our manufactured goods from slaves in Asia or Central America, then what? –K.R.

“The flu season is upon us. Which type will we worry about this year, and what kind of shots will we be told to take? Remember the swine flu scare of 1976? That was the year the U.S. government told us all that swine flu could turn out to be a killer that could spread across the nation, and Washington decided that every man, woman and child in the nation should get a shot to prevent a nation-wide outbreak, a pandemic.

Well 46 million of us obediently took the shot, and now 4,000 Americans are claiming damages from Uncle Sam amounting to three and a half billion dollars because of what happened when they took that shot. By far the greatest number of the claims – two thirds of them are for neurological damage, or even death, allegedly triggered by the flu shot. (CBS, 60 MINUTES, 1979)

The WHO and the US administration in alliance with Big Pharma are involved in a major propaganda campaign to implement compulsory vaccination.

There is no more “honest reporting” by mainstream TV as in this 1979 CBS TV program. Today, with some exceptions, network TV in America is complicit with the government’s disinformation campaign.

Michel Chossudovsky, July 18, 2009

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The “Swine Flu” is actually a genetic combination of human, avian (bird) and porcine flus. Even the CDC admits this.

This virus was originally referred to as “swine flu” because laboratory testing showed that many of the genes in this new virus were very similar to influenza viruses that normally occur in pigs in North America. But further study has shown that this new virus is very different from what normally circulates in North American pigs. It has two genes from flu viruses that normally circulate in pigs in Europe and Asia and avian genes and human genes. Scientists call this a “quadruple reassortant” virus.

With your support, your phone calls, your emails, we won a major legislative victory today for a state single payer health care option in the House of Representatives in Washington, DC. The House Education and Labor Committee approved the Kucinich Amendment by a vote of 27-19, with 14 Democrats and 13 Republicans voting yes.

The amendment propels the growing single payer health care movement at the state level. There are at least ten states which have active single payer efforts in their legislatures. They are California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington. The amendment mandates a single payer state will receive the right to waive the application of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), which has in the past been used to nullify efforts to expand state or local government health care.

Under the Kucinich Amendment a state’s application for a waiver from ERISA is granted automatically if the state has signed into law a single payer plan. With the amendment, for the first time, the state single payer health care option is shielded from an ERISA-based legal attack. Now that the underlying bill has been passed, as amended, by the full committee, we must make sure that Congress knows that we want the provision kept in the bill at final passage!

The state single payer option was one of five major amendments which I obtained support to get included in HR3200. One amendment brings into standard coverage for the first time complementary and alternative medicine, (integrative medicine). Another amendment drives down the cost of prescription drugs by ending pharmaceutical industry’s sharp practices manipulating physician prescribing habits. An amendment stops the insurance industry from increasing premiums at the time when people are not permitted to change health plans; and finally an amendment imposing a requirement on insurance companies that they disclose the cost of advertising, marketing and executive compensation expenses (which generally divert money from patient care).

Please make sure you post this message on your social networking site, ask all your friends to get involved and encourage everyone you know to sign up at http://www.Kucinich.us so we can build full momentum behind this movement for real health care.

Let’s do this!
–Dennis
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DK is doing his best to keep open the door for what the ordinary people. not the insurers and Big Pharma and their toadies in Congress want. Preserving the states’ ability to have their own single payer plans may be more theory than practice in this economy, though Montana is one of two states, along with North Dakota, which is running a surplus, so maybe they will give it a try.

Help DK do what he can. It is interesting that he was chosen to be the majority leader’s designated speaker on the stimulus package in January, and that he got five amendments to the health care bill adopted in committee. Is Dennis Kucinich, one of the few true voices of the people in Congress, finally being listened to? — K.R.